she couldn’t have said what, exactly, it was. It certainly wasn’t human. But it was no animal, no bird, that she recognized. It had eyes, but everything else was constantly changing, as clouds changed even as you watched them. She couldn’t read the eyes, either; they showed no emotion that she was able to recognize.
Wasn’t the Greek God of the Air . . . Chaos?
Without any warning at all, she found herself—or her mind, anyway, being leafed through like a book. One moment, she was just hovering there, and in the next, it was as if something was calling up memory after memory at a dizzying pace. Memories of being tiny, and watching the sylphs play above her. Of being a little older, and watching the pixies, and ever so carefully, to keep from frightening them, trying to get their attention.
Of Mother teaching her the rudiments of magic. Of learning to shield, and to use it wisely. Of calling small storms to water the garden, of clearing clouds away so the wash would dry. Of making lights in the darkness, of feeding the sylphs bits of it. And then . . .
When that handsome, terrible man had tried to hurt her.
The moment froze. She froze, caught in the terror of the time, reliving it as if it was still happening.
She felt the Being examining the memory, the emotions, carefully. Weighing it. Measuring it.
And then, dismissing it and moving on. She watched herself learning to defend herself, and learning to shoot, and then the memories began passing through her too quickly for her to recognize them properly, until suddenly they froze again.
Froze on the moment that she had told the night-sylphs, “Take his breath!” and the Hauptmann had died.
Now the Being turned its attention, not on the memory, but on her. It asked her no questions, and yet . . . it questioned.
It examined her, in that moment. Examined every nuance of thought, every hint of feeling. Scoured the moment, looking . . . looking . . . for something.
The memory inched forward, to the next moment, when the sylphs had told her that the Hauptmann was not moving.
Once again, she felt everything about that memory being scoured, examined, taken apart, reexamined.
The memory inched forward, slowly, agonizingly, those all-seeing Eyes watching, watching for . . . what? She couldn’t tell. She was inside the memory, and yet outside of it. Experiencing it again, able to feel and think everything she had felt and thought at the time, and yet somehow outside of it, as much a spectator as that Being was.
Then she was out the window, and her memories sped up again, flying past, so that she could only recognize a moment here, a moment there, and in that recognition they were gone again.
Then she got a glimpse of the mountaintop of this morning, of the Great Air Elementals, of the Thunderbird, and then . . .
Then it was over. And she was back to being herself and not a compendium of remembrances, hanging in front of those fathomless eyes.
“Would you have done what you did a second time?”
The Being didn’t just mean inadvertently killing the Hauptmann. It meant everything.
“Without knowing what I know now, how would I have been able to change anything?” she asked, honestly. “I am absolutely responsible for the death of that man, no matter what Rosamund and Tante Gretchen say. But without having had some way to see the future, I don’t know what else I could have done besides allow myself to be . . .” She choked on the word. She still couldn’t bear to say it. “I can be responsible, regret it, and still know I would have had to act to save myself, all at the same time!” she said, at last. “And I am responsible, and I do regret it, and I wish there was a way to change it. But not at the cost of letting myself become someone’s victim.”
“Interesting.”
“It is the truth,” she said, meeting those Eyes squarely.
“It is.” There was a very, very long silence.
“I will never, ever, ask an Elemental to harm someone again,” she said into that silence. “If harm is to be done, I will do it myself. It is not fair to ask them to be used as a weapon. If I had the chance to do that over again, that is what I would do.”
“Ahhhhhhhhh.” Another long silence. “And if they elect to provide . . . aid . . . on their